Every morning, Jim Eenigenburg climbs into the passenger seat of his Subaru station wagon and drives to his job in rural Will County.
Technically speaking, he sits in the driver’s seat, but in this car, the driver’s seat is where the passenger seat is in just about every other car in the country.
Confusing? Perhaps, but nonetheless right.
As opposed to left, which would have made things much simpler in the first place.
For, you see, the distinctions between right and left can bewilder when talking about the handful of people in the U.S. who, out of necessity or preference, hit the highways in right-hand-drive cars.
Most Americans-in fact, most of the people in the world-drive sitting on the left-hand side of the car, which travels the right-hand-side of the road.
However, in places such as Britain, Australia and Japan, traffic flows on the left side of the road, and the steering wheel is on the right side of the dashboard.
That much, at least, is fairly straightforward.
But then along come folks such as Eenigenburg, driving on the right-and correct-side of American roads while sitting on the right-and wrong-side of the car.
It’s perfectly legal, though it’s a disarming sight, especially if you happen to be trying to pass the flip-flopped driver.
“Sure, I’ve gotten my share of stares,” said Eenigenburg, a rural mail carrier who owns and drives a right-hand-drive car made for members of his trade. “But it doesn’t bother me. I feel as comfortable in this car as when I used to drive from the left-hand side.”
All of this talk about where people drive leads to a few intriguing questions:
Why do some countries drive on the right while others drive on the left? And how did we get to this international fork in the road?
Who decided to put the steering wheel where it is? Wouldn’t it be easier, for the sake of global harmony, to stick the thing in the middle of the dashboard?
And what possesses those out-of-place few who occasionally drive on American roads from the wrong side of the car?
For answers to those questions and more, one must first take a drive into the somewhat sketchy and myth-filled (but never uninteresting) lore of right- and left-hand drive.
Depending on who you ask, we drive where we drive for any number of reasons. Two of the popular theories:
– When horses were the primary means of transportation, British gentlemen often wore fashionable sabers on the left hip. These swords would poke out to the left when men sat upon their horses.
Thus, if traffic flowed on the right side of the road, the swords would clang together in the center when two riders headed in opposite directions past each other. So the British began riding on the left.
Americans switched from the left to the right in pre-revolutionary days out of revolutionary obstinacy.
– In the era of horse-drawn carriages and dirt roads, women often sat as passengers on the left side of a vehicle. To ensure that ladies would not soil their petticoats while exiting, carriages would drive on the left to be as close to the curb as possible.
Again with this theory, Americans later switched out of revolutionary obstinacy.
But according to automotive historians, who don’t seem certain themselves, both of these explanations probably are wrong.
The apparent truth in this case, however, doesn’t sound much different from the fiction.
Mark Patrick, curator of the National Automotive History collection in Detroit, said driving directions probably originated in Roman times, with things starting out all right.
It seems that warriors carried their swords in their right hands, shields in their left, over their hearts. So they walked on the right to keep the shield facing the center of the road, protecting themselves from oncoming traffic.
The first flip-flop came when British women began riding sidesaddle, tradition dictating that their legs dangle to the left. They traveled on the left side of the road to avoid collisions, Patrick said.
This tradition carried on in the U.S. until the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. In short, Americans switched out of revolutionary obstinacy.
“Just to be different and difficult, we said we would ride and drive on the right-hand side,” said Alex Sorton, deputy director of the traffic engineering division at the Northwestern University Traffic Institute in Evanston. “Somehow it stuck.”
Though driving and riding on the right caught on in other countries-most of Europe now drives on the right, as does Canada-when the auto era opened, almost all steering wheels were on the right.
But in countries that stay to the right, this placement made it difficult to see oncoming traffic. So to increase visibility, some automakers experimented, placing the wheel in the center.
Not until 1908 did the wheel complete its move to the left, with Henry Ford generally being credited with creating the left-hand drive auto.
“It was a practical measure to improve the ability to safely handle a car,” Patrick said. “Something that simple required a kind of radical rethinking.”
American automakers nonetheless continued making right-hand drive cars in the U.S. until the 1930s, when most made the move to left-hand drive vehicles for domestic use.
With few exceptions (such as Sweden’s chaotic overnight change in September 1967 from driving on the left to the right), that’s where traffic has stood since: About 70 percent of the world driving on the right, the steering column on the left; Britain and many of its former colonies driving on the left, the wheel on the right.
But, in a figurative sense, the road is not always so clearly divided.
Chief among the exceptions to these rules of the roads are the roughly 95,000 rural letter carriers in the U.S., as well as thousands of car enthusiasts who maintain right-hand drive collectibles.
“A right-hand drive car has long been considered a fashionable thing, even in the U.S.,” said Philip C. Brooks, an automotive historian and member of the Rolls-Royce Owners Club.
Brooks estimates that as many as 5,000 to 10,000 right-hand drive Rolls-Royce and Bentley autos may be on the road in the U.S. He owns three.
“I’ve never thought a thing about it,” Brooks mused. “Everybody assumes that it is a tremendous problem to drive these cars in the United States, but it’s not. Just make sure you stick to the correct side of the road-that’s the important thing.”
Though Brooks and other vintage-car owners lean to the right for reasons of hobby, rural mail carriers do so out of necessity.
Many of the rural carriers use their own cars to distribute the mail along the country’s more than 53,000 out-of-the-way rural delivery routes.
As they ply back roads, most rural carriers don’t have access to the boxy, right-hand-drive postal vehicles common on city streets.
And until recently, using a left-hand drive car meant constant stops and starts and walking to reach mailboxes on the shoulder of the road.
Thus, necessity often led to creative thinking-not to mention sore muscles.
“Some of our carriers tore out their car dashboards and hooked up contraptions to extend the wheel and pedals to the passenger seat,” said Ken Parmelee, vice president of government affairs for the National Rural Letter Carriers Association in Washington, D.C.
“Some simply sat in the right-hand seat and drove with their left hand and foot,” he added. “Of course, you had to make sure you bought a car with pedals that were easy to reach with your left foot.”
A few carriers were lucky enough to find one of the few surplus right-hand drive vehicles discarded by the Postal Service.
Still others bought left-hand drive cars and shelled out a few thousand dollars to have a mechanic add a second wheel and new pedals on the passenger side.
This “conversion” turns a vehicle into something reminiscent of a driver’s education car-a series of gears, belts and rods linking the wheels and pedals.
“It looks a little strange driving down the road with two steering wheels,” says Herbert Hibbing, a Beecher letter carrier who had a conversion kit installed on his 1989 Ford Bronco. “But it makes my life a lot easier.”
“I had to learn to be a contortionist,” said Ron Buckwalter, a carrier in Mt. Carroll and president of the Illinois branch of the rural carriers association. “I just reach over with my left foot and be careful. After a while, you adapt.”
But some carriers grew tired of the inconvenience, as well as the risks of their makeshift methods (the left-hand stretch makes it impossible to wear seat belts, and outstretched feet are susceptible to slipping off the pedals.)
For years, the national association appealed to major U.S. automakers to produce right-hand drive cars for rural carriers. But the market for such a product was too limited to interest the Big Three, Parmelee said.
In 1991, however, the association persuaded Subaru to begin providing the option for rural carriers.
Since then, the company has sold about 4,600 of the right-hand drive Legacy wagons to rural carriers, said Ken Stanton, vice president of sales operations for Subaru of America, based in Cherry Hill, N.J.
“Other companies shied away from this project because it involved a low volume and a very big risk,” Stanton said.
“But these carriers had a need that car companies were not filling,” he said. “Plus, it was a lot easier for a Japanese company to do this because we were already producing plenty of right-hand-drive cars.”
For the first two years of the program, the flip-flopped cars were imported from Japan. Two years ago, the company modified its Legacy factory in Lafayette, Ind., to produce right-hand- and left-hand-drive cars.
Rural carriers can order the special cars, which have a base price of $15,875 and come in red, white or taupe, from a Subaru dealer. A comparably-equipped left-hand drive model would come with a base price of $19,305, Stanton said.
“A lot of us appreciated the fact that someone finally made these vehicles available for us to use,” Eenigenburg said. “It makes life a little easier.”
Indeed, rural carriers now have even more choice in the right-hand-drive market. In 1993, Chrysler Corp. began producing right-hand drive Jeep Cherokees at its Toledo assembly plant.
Though most of the cars were built for export to Japan, Britain and other nations, a few stayed behind for postal use, said Jerry Huber, the Toledo plant manager.
Last year, the plant built about 18,000 of the cars, only 759 of which remained in the U.S. Production will rise to 21,800 right-hand-drive Cherokees in 1995, with about 350 for mail delivery. The plant will assemble 150,000 left-hand drive Cherokees this year.
Huber said the right-hand-drive Jeep came about after trade restrictions with Japan began to relax; the postal vehicles were merely an outgrowth of increased international demand.
“We saw the market, and the opportunity to get market penetration internationally,” Huber said. “That allowed us to develop a prototype right-hand-drive vehicle for the postal service.”
Much like Chrysler, Ford Motor Co. began domestic production of right-hand-drive Probes in 1993 as trade limits eased, and the company plans to build right-hand-drive Tauruses and Explorers.
All are destined for export, said Jim Trainor, export operations communications manager for Ford.
General Motors Corp. is joining in by producing right-hand-drive Chevrolet Cavaliers that will be sold as Toyotas in Japan beginning in 1996.
“Until recently, producing right-hand-drive for export was little more than an afterthought,” Ford’s Trainor said. “But if we want to compete overseas, we have to go in with a right-hand-drive product.”
Coming up with that product, however, can be complicated.
For example, Chrysler spent at least $250,000 to revamp its Toledo plant to produce the right-hand-drive Cherokee on the same assembly line as its left-hand version, Huber said.
The right-hand version has about 350 unique parts, from different door panels to new side mirrors to a relocated switch for the power windows. Not to mention a reversed pattern on the windshield wipers.
“At first, you just think of the steering wheel moving over,” Huber said. “But when you stop and think of some of the ramifications of moving the driver, it can be quite something.”
In its Flat Rock, Mich., plant, Ford added 12 checkpoints to make sure that left-handed parts were not being put in right-hand Probes, Trainor said.
Many rural mail carriers hope the flurry of domestic right-hand-drive production will increase their ability to shop around.
But some doubt that the number of curb-side drivers will grow very rapidly in the U.S.
“In this country, it doesn’t make much sense to buy a right-hand-drive car,” said Floyd Pape, a rural carrier from Schaumburg who drives a temporarily converted left-hand drive car.
“Outside of another rural carrier, who in their right mind would want one of those things? You can’t exactly trade in a right-hand-drive car. Once you buy one, you’re stuck with it-for good.”
